Is it legal for Colorado communities to impose a “fee” on bags at grocery checkout stands in order to discourage their use?

Probably not, but that isn’t stopping them.

Telluride started the movement a year ago (its ordinance took full effect in March). And just this week, the Aspen council voted to ban plastic checkout bags and impose a 20-cent fee on paper bags. Basalt has taken similar action, and a number of other towns, from Carbondale to Glenwood Springs, are looking into the idea.

In Boulder, meanwhile, the Daily Camera reports that at a recent study session, “a majority of the council supported pursuing a fee on plastic shopping bags.”

I wouldn’t be surprised to see Denver take up this baton at some point, too, given the leftward lurch of the council this year and the appointment of greenie Doug Linkhart as the new manager of environmental health.

My point is not that bag fees are necessarily a bad idea. I don’t like them, but I don’t like banning bags, either, and yet would never dispute Colorado communities’ right to choose that more radical path. What they are not free to do, however, is impose a tax and call it a fee, because that runs afoul of the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.

Fees are supposed to pay for related services. As the state Supreme Court (no friend of TABOR) decreed a few years ago, “If the … primary purpose for the charge is to finance a particular service utilized by those who must pay the charge, then the charge is a ‘fee.’ On the other hand, if … the charge is to raise revenues for general governmental spending, then it is a tax.”

A fee should also be related to the actual cost of providing a service, not just pulled out of thin air in order to satisfy a social goal. Yet it’s simply not credible that collection and disposal of each bag costs 20 cents. If it did, we’d be paying vastly more for residential trash collection than we do.

No wonder bag fees range all over the place. Two years ago, the legislature considered (and rejected) a 6-cent fee on plastic bags. And Telluride’s fee on paper bags is 10 cents. Is it really possible Aspen’s true costs are twice as high?

Hardly. As a memo this month by Aspen environmental health director Ashley Cantrell admits, “The purpose of the fee on paper bags is … to create awareness around the topic of single use items. The amount of the fee needs to be high enough to incentivize change while not causing a financial burden and staff feels a fee of $0.20 on paper bags accomplishes that. A smaller ten or fifteen cent fee would likely not to be enough to affect the actions of customers.”

Cantrell does reference a San Francisco study from a few years back that apparently claims it cost that city “as much as $0.17 per bag,” but even if that study were persuasive, since when do Colorado cities base their fees on the purported cost of a service in another state?

And if that is the normal practice in Aspen, why didn’t it follow the lead of Washington, D.C., where the bag fee is 5 cents?

Aspen isn’t going to use the fee primarily for the collection and disposal of bags anyway (which is mostly taken care of already, of course). Instead, the money will go to educate the public about the impact of trash and other environmental matters, buy recycling containers, provide reusable bags to residents and visitors, purchase signs to inform customers of the policy, fund community cleanup of trash, and reduce overall waste.

In Boulder, according to the Daily Camera, Councilwoman KC Becker makes no bones about why she supports a bag fee: “because it generates income for the city.”

Sorry, that’s not a legitimate purpose under TABOR.

If a Colorado town thinks checkout bags are an environmental scourge, then ban them. But don’t start pretending that a tax is a fee.

Many were not surprised by the prompt verdict Monday in the sexual-assault case in Denver involving Taylor Swift. A jury of six women and two men concluded within hours that a Denver radio host had groped Swift _ grabbed her butt beneath her skirt during a photo shoot, as his wife stood on the other side of Swift.

Touch not that statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville. Let it stand, but around it place plaques telling the curious that the man was a traitor to his country who went to war so white people could continue to own black people.